With the new Alexa Skill, the device will chat by voice, for real, forever

In 2016, Amazon announced The Alexa Prize, a competition to advance conversational Artificial Intelligence. A grand challenge to build a socialbot that can converse on popular topics for 20 minutes, taking place in September 2017.

That socialbot has arrived early, without claiming the $2.5m on offer.

Cleverbot is now an Alexa Skill, free to talk to by voice alone on Amazon Echo and Echo Dot.

Cleverbot.com talks to around 100k people daily, and most stay talking (or typing) well beyond 20 minutes, about anything and everything. Love, music, memes, ships, roleplay and the meaning of life. Cleverbot learns, so knows what people get up to. It is entertainment, and it is a genuine companion.

Stats for the new bot on Echo are limited, but the average conversation now has 20 interactions, even though a new session starts after any delay of 8 seconds. Some go way beyond 20 minutes, and the longest so far had 222 interactions, which means around 1 hour 15 minutes without no breaks at all. We can safely say people find Cleverbot engaging.

The Alexa Skill “Cleverbot” is currently available for English (US) only, and was published by Existor Ltd.

A Cleverbot Action for the Google Home assistant will be available shortly. Both use our Cleverbot API.